NASCAR tougher than NFL for Gibbs

Mike Harris

Thursday, Oct. 26, 2000 | 5:37 a.m.

Super Bowls? Hah.

Joe Gibbs insists winning in NASCAR is tougher than in the NFL, where the former Redskins coach won three championships.

After nearly a decade as a Winston Cup car owner, Gibbs is on the brink of claiming stock car racing's biggest prize for the first time.

With just three events remaining, Joe Gibbs Racing's Bobby Labonte has a commanding 201-point lead over Dale Earnhardt in the championship race. All the hard work is about to pay off for Gibbs.

"I've been in this nine years," said the man still known as Coach. "In the same amount of time in football we went to three Super Bowls.

"Over here, no championships, no nothing. That tells you a little about how hard this is as a sport."

Gibbs, whose Washington Redskins teams went 124-60 in 12 seasons, won the title for the first time in 1982 - in just his second year. The coach went to the Super Bowl four times, his only loss in 1984 to the Los Angeles Raiders.

The last NFL championship for Gibbs was in 1992, the year his Winston Cup team began competing.

"It's been some long, hard years," Gibbs said. "We've taken just about every kind of lump, from missing races to finishing 19th in a season to fighting your guts out trying to win a race."

The first win actually came at the start of the second season, when Dale Jarrett, the Gibbs team's first driver, won the Daytona 500 - the Super Bowl of stock car racing.

"As big as that was, it was just one race," Gibbs said. "That's the only race we won that year."

Besides giving Gibbs his first victory, Jarrett helped lay the foundation of a top team by recruiting brother-in-law Jimmy Makar as crew chief.

"Getting Jimmy Makar was probably the single most important thing we did in building this team," Gibbs said. "In football, I was the guy that called the plays and technically made it happen.

"Jimmy Makar is the coach over here. My role as an owner is to get the resources, get the sponsors and keep them happy, and pick the people."

That first year, the team had just 18 employees and a small race shop. Now Gibbs employs close to 150 people in a state-of-the-art facility near Charlotte, N.C.

Makar, a crew member when Rusty Wallace won the 1989 championship for Roger Penske, was lured to the startup team after a two-hour meeting with Gibbs.

"I had a real good job with Rusty, but I thought it couldn't hurt to listen," Makar said. "After leaving that meeting, I told my wife that Joe was very different from anybody I had ever talked to about racing and about his ideals and about what how he thought a team should function and it's priorities.

"He sounded like a guy that was going to care a lot about the individuals that worked for him, not just the job they could do."

Makar points to limited turnover at Joe Gibbs Racing in a revolving-door sport as proof that Coach has lived up to those expectations.

"People want to work for Joe Gibbs," Makar said.

Jarrett won another race for Gibbs in 1994 before leaving for Robert Yates Racing, where he claimed the championship last year. Jarrett was replaced by Labonte, who has 16 wins - including four this season.

The team also added a second car last year, hiring Tony Stewart, who won rookie honors and has a series-leading five wins this season.

Gibbs, a lifelong racing fan, left football for motorsports because of his family. Eldest son J.D. is now the team's president, and son Coy is driving in and running the Craftsman Truck Series operation. Both played college football but preferred racing.

"My first son graduated and said, 'Dad, I'd rather go into something in motorsports,"' Gibbs remembered. "I said, 'Let's try to put a race team together.' One thing led to another, and we were able to get that done."

The elder Gibbs is amazed because everything that happened to him in football is happening again in auto racing. And he says success in both sports is achieved because of quality personnel.

"You don't win with cars in racing and you don't win with Xs and Os in football," he said. "I think the enjoyable part of getting to a Super Bowl or a championship is the struggle."

Does he miss football?

"I don't really think about it much," Gibbs said. "I miss the relationships and some of the thrills over there. My time in football was 28 years. That was enough."